Buzz Lightyear of Star Command: The Adventure Begins (2000)
I know I should’ve foreseen this coming, but I wanted to believe this movie had a chance of being good. It’s a spin-off of Toy Story, one of the greatest animated films of all time. How could it be bad? Oh, I’ll tell you. Buzz Lightyear of Star Command: The Adventure Begins is exactly what you expect; an unfunny attempt at cashing in on a popular franchise with no original ideas of its own.
Set in the Toy Story universe, Buzz Lightyear, the space ranger, not the toy (voiced by Tim Allen) is grieving over the loss of his space partner, Warp Darkmatter (Diedrich Bader) at the hands of the Evil Emperor Zurg (Wayne Knight). While Lightyear struggles to find a replacement (the likely candidates being a crappy robot named RX, a space princess that can phase through objects, and an alien janitor) Zurg gets ready to unleash his most diabolical plan yet.
This is nothing but a ripoff of DC Comic’s Green Lantern Corps. A bunch of aliens, united together under a single unit to combat the forces of evil wherever it may be in the galaxy. It's not grounds for outright dismissal, but it doesn’t help. The malfunction that blows up the ship is the lack of originality. Buzz isn’t particularly interesting because he was never meant to be by himself. He was created as a partner to Woody (who isn’t voiced by Tom Hanks, but rather by his younger brother in the opening scene). He’s a straight-laced stickler for the rules that hates the Evil Emperor Zurg that subconsciously wants to prove he's the best Space Ranger there is. Yawn.
The movie wants you to remind you of Toy Story so bad, even if it makes no sense. A good example is the Little Green Men. Remember those guys? Remember how they were these random no-brand alien toys found inside the Pizza Planet claw game? Now they're an integral part of the Star Command. Then how come they didn't recognize each other? If Buzz has never seen Emperor Zurg (as established in Toy Story 2) how can he know him so well? Another inconsistency is Zurg himself. It’s clear to everyone that’s seen “Toy Story 2” that the character is supposed to be an amalgamation of a Flash Gordon's Emperor Ming and Darth Vader. He’s all kind of mysterious and diabolical. He's cool, calm, and collected like a robot. It’s nothing like the over-the-top, mustache-twirling baddie that we have here.
I recognize this is aimed at little kids. Some will say it should be given some slack for that reason. I don't think so. Was Toy Story meant for little kids? Was Toy Story 2 filled with bad jokes about people not knowing what arms were, or people accidentally finding themselves in their underwear in front of their peers?
The overall writing will make you wish you could jettison yourself into space. You can foresee every plot twist and character arc less than 2 minutes after the characters is introduced. Check out XR (voiced by Larry Miller), one of the all-time worst robots I’ve ever seen in a movie. If it's destroyed, it has the special ability to... be repaired. Wow! so if it gets blown to smithereens because it sucks and has no body armor, someone can gather all of the smoldering chunks, bring it back to Star Command and it could be reassembled into a still barely-functioning Space Ranger as long as no pieces are missing? How exciting!
You'll groan at the onslaught of bad one-liners and wannabe jokes, the worst of which comes from janitor Booster (voiced by Stephen Furst). The best part of this 71-minute television pilot is right at the beginning, where we see the familiar faces of the Toy Story cast together. It’s all downhill from there. The character designs are stylish but the plot is a black hole. The humor is so bad it's embarrassing. You'll wonder if shooting Castaway is what prevented Tom Hanks from participating, or if he just read the script. I just hope I’m the last person to ever suffer through Buzz Lightyear of Star Command: The Adventure Begins. (On VHS, April 21, 2015)
